Feed Your Brain Lecture Series

Please join us at 4:30 p.m. on the third Sundays of every month for our FEED YOUR BRAIN programs.

These events feature
fascinating authors, scholars, and luminaries from many fields
that expand our knowledge and understanding of the world and the
people who inhabit it. CFI's naturalistic approach to wisdom
holds that there is no issue exempt from examination and
discussion. Admission to these events is $8, or free for Friends of the Center, unless otherwise noted.

Held at the Costa Mesa Community Center
1845 Park Ave. Costa Mesa, CA 92627
1 block west of Newport and Harbor Blvd.

Please see upcoming lectures below.

Yvette d'Entremont

Bad Heatlh Science in the 21st Century

Sunday, April 19
4:30 p.m.

From vaccines to chemo, modern science provides a wealth of services to prevent and heal disease. According to some sources on the internet, these are actually making us sicker. What's good science and what's just plain old BS? Yvette d'Entremont, aka "Science Babe," willl walk you through it with a funny and informative discussion on how to detect reputable health advice on these topics and how modern science is making us live longer and healthier lives than ever before.

Yvette d'Entremont holds bachelor's degrees in theatre and chemistry along with a master's degree in forensic science. With a background working as an analytical chemist, she currently runs the Science Babe website full time. Her site becomes a reliable mix of debunking pseudoscience with a combination of humor and real science. You can find more information at scibabe.com.

Tony Ortega

The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology Tried to Destroy Paulette Cooper

Sunday, May 174:30 p.m.

In 1971, a magazine freelancer in New York named Paulette Cooper came out with her first book, The Scandal of Scientology, and it was the first popular book that gave the public a view into this secretive organization. She nearly paid for it with her life. What even Paulette didn't know at the time was the extent that Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, would go to destroy someone it perceived as an enemy. By 1973, Paulette had been framed in an elaborate plot involving fake bomb-threat letters, and she faced 15 years in federal prison if convicted. Newly unearthed documents show that by that time, Scientology had kept her under tight surveillance for several years and proposed many ways to destroy her reputation and life. She was finally exonerated after the FBI raided Scientology in 1977 and found those documents, which referred to her by the code name "Miss Lovely." Eleven top Scientology officials went to prison after that raid, but more than 30 years later, Scientology is still around -- and so is Paulette.

In his new, and first, book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, journalist Tony Ortega tells Paulette's story in full for the first time, with eyewitness accounts and new documents which describe the full extent of her ordeal -- and her continured fight against a group now seriously in decline. For the launch of the book, Paulette will be appearing with the author at a limited number of events as they talk about various parts of her life depicted in the book, from her childhood survival of the Holocaust to her much calmer life in Florida with her husband Paul, as well as the latest developments in the controversies facing Scientology today.

Ortega is the executive editor of The Raw Story, a progressive political news site. From 2007 to 2012, he was editor in chief of The Village Voice, and he's been investigating and writing about Scientology since 1995, when he was a reporter for the Phoenix New Times. He also wrote for or edited weekly newspapers in Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Fort Lauderdale. Originally from Los Angeles, he lives in New York and maintains a breaking news website about Scientology news, "The Underground Bunker." He is also featured in Going Clear, Alex Gibney's documentary about Scientology, which first aired on HBO in March.